Dreadful Nonsense

Mrs Bishop and I had a trip out last night, to take a break, and we thought that going to the comedy club would make a lovely and inviting distraction from the day's events. So we wandered in to town, forgetting that it was the 1st of May and that people would vaguely protesting about stuff, and that the army and police would be firing water cannons around for no reason, and that there would be more dreadlocks than usual around the place.

When we got to the pub that holds the comedy, we stood outside, with Mrs B having a smoke and me finishing off the first thing I'd remembered to eat all day, and to the right of us we watched the comedians turning up for the night to whore themselves on stage for the sake of other's entertainment. To the left of us, we watched the queue of others form, ready to laugh at the monkey men (for it was all men) willing to embarrass themselves with their own words and deeds. And we decided that we wouldn't go to the comedy because (a) we were able to recite word for word every joke that would be said that night by every comedian that turned up and because (b) some of the crowd were there together, with hats on, calling themselves a stag night. Stag nights and hen nights are the anti-christs of comedy crowds, and we would bear no witness to them. Mrs B and myself therefore decided to sit downstairs in pub below the comedy because we could think of no better place to go. We decided that this particular pub would be the one drinking establishment in Dublin that night with the least dreadlocks.

So we spent the night talking about boys, about politics, about alcohol, for a few memorable moments about football with an old drunk man called Noel, and then again about boys. We would take breaks occasionally from the talk to stand outside while Mrs B had a cigarette, and we'd talk - but this time in the open air - about boys.

I think the smoking ban is lovely. But my reasons for thinking this have changed dramatically since the ban came in. The smoking ban is a horror for many reasons, and not least because everywhere now STINKS to high heaven of things that you couldn't smell when there was cigarette smoke. Beer makes you fart and burp and now all you can smell are farts and burps. Beer falls on floors in pubs and gets soaked in to the carpets and now all you can smell are stinky stale beer carpets. People go to and from the toilet all the time in pubs and now all you can smell is the waft of toilet perfume every time the toilet doors are opened. People get hot and sweaty when it's warm and crowded in pubs and now all you can smell is hot, sweaty, beery, farty, burpy, toilety people. And because you've given up smoking due to the smoking ban, you can smell these things even more clearly than before.

But the smoking ban is also lovely because now you have to go outside in groups to smoke. You stand outside in the lovely, fresh spring weather, on these lovely balmy nights, and the outside of the pub is so much more fun than the inside of the pub. It's the same as when you used to be in school and had to go hide in the woods at the back of the school grounds to have your cigarette break at lunchtime (and then spray each other with perfume and deodorant and body spray to hide the smell of the B&H that you'd nicked off your mum and eat polo mints all afternoon), and you'd all be crowded around the same lighter and you'd all be in this clique that was so cool and grown up and secret and dangerous and you're all in the same gang and it's great. It's great to be in a gang with a group identity, it's great to be an outsider and a rebel. And you get to meet some right nut jobs while standing outside pubs.

Last night we met a man from Shropshire who didn't like living in Shropshire, who gave both me and Mrs B a special hug that managed to involve touching our breasts and then tried to kiss Mrs B on the mouth; we met a young bloke from Dublin with a tight white t-shirt on who wanted to know who to infiltrate the May Day anarchists, because he said he was working for the CIA; we met a man who was a musician who was meeting the Pope the next day in Rome and offered to say prayers for us until I told him I was protestant and then he leapt away from me as if he had been burnt; we met another man who tried to buy grass off us and when we told him we had no grass tried to sell grass to us.

It was all more entertaining than the comedy ever could have been.

This entry was posted on 02 May 2004 at 3:46 pm. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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